Kay Redfield Jamison Quotes

It is true that I had wanted to die , but that is peculiarly different from regretting having been born. Overwhelmingly, I was enormously glad to have been born, grateful for life, and I couldn't imagine not wanting to pass on life to someone else. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Looking at suicide - the sheer numbers, the pain leading up to it, and the suffering left behind - is harrowing. For every moment of exuberance in the science, or in the success of governments, there is a matching and terrible reality of the deaths themselves: the young deaths, the violent deaths, the unnecessary deaths ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Nothing good comes out of depression. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

When public figures remain silent about depression, there is a cost to the rest of society. Silence contributes to the misperception that successful people do not get depressed, and it keeps the public from seeing that treatment allows many individuals to return to competitive professional lives. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

In some cases, some people do get depressed in the middle of their grief, and they really need to be treated for depression. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

I occasionally laugh and tell him that his imperturbability is worth three hundred milligrams of lithium a day to me, and it is probably true. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Confidentiality is an ancient and well-warranted social value. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Scientists have made extraordinary advances in understanding the brain and its disorders. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

There are relatively few things that kill people that are young other than car accidents and suicide. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Patient sees [lithium] medication as a promise of a cure, and a means of suicide if it doesn't work. She fears that by taking it she will risk her last resort ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

I think that for thousands of years people have made the observation that there are certain kinds of extreme depressive states that seem to be more likely to produce philosophers, people in the arts, unusually brilliant scientists. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Time does not heal,
It makes a half-stitched scar
That can be broken and again you feel
Grief as total as in its first hour.
-Elizabeth Jennings ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Because the privacy of my nightmare had been of my own designing, no one close to me had any real idea of the psychological company I had been keeping. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

You become aware of an illness by understanding yourself and understanding the meaning that that illness has in your own life, symbolically and, more importantly, quite literally. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

The horror of profound depression, and the hopelessness that usually accompanies it, are hard to imagine for those who have not experienced them. Because the despair is private, it is resistant to clear and compelling description. Novelist William Styron, however, in recounting his struggle with suicidal depression, captures vividly the heavy, inescapable pain that can lead to suicide:

What I had begun to discover is that, mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain. But it is not an immediately identifiable pain, like that of a broken limb. It may be more accurate to say that despair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. And because no breeze stirs this cauldron, because there is no escape from this smothering confinement, it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion. (105) ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Her parents, she said, has put a pinball machine inside her head when she was five years old. The red balls told her when she should laugh, the blue ones when she should be silent and keep away from other people; the green balls told her that she should start multiplying by three. Every few days a silver ball would make its way through the pins of the machine. At this point her head turned and she stared at me; I assumed she was checking to see if I was still listening. I was, of course. How could one not? The whole thing was bizarre but riveting. I asked her, What does the silver ball mean? She looked at me intently, and then everything went dead in her eyes. She stared off into space, caught up in some internal world. I never found out what the silver ball meant. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

They used to treat sheep carcasses with Lithium so if the Coyotes went after the herd and bit on the treated carcasses, the got so sick they kept their teeth to themselves. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

The quickness and flexibility of a well mind, a belief or hope that things will eventually sort themselves out-these are the resources lost to a person when the brain is ill. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're "not at all like yourself but will be soon," but you know you won't. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Grief said C.S. Lewis is like "a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape." This is so. The lessons that come from grief come from its unexpected moves, from its shifting views of what had gone before and what is yet to come. Pain brought so often into one's consciousness cannot maintain the same capacity to wound. Grief, however creates strange sensitivity. The world is too intense to tolerate: a veil, a drink, another anaesthetic is required to blot out the ache of what remains. One sees too much and feels it, as Robert Lowell put it, "with one skin-layer missing."
Grief conspires to ensure that it will in time wear itself out. Unlike depression, it acts to preserve the self. Depression is malignant, indiscriminately destructive. Grief may bear resemblance to depression, but it is a distant kinship. In Grief, death occasions the pain. In depression, death is the solution to the pain. In Grief, one feels the absence of a life, not life itself. In depression, it is otherwise one cannot access the beat of life! ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

[The] persevering steadiness of my mother, her belief in seeing things through, and her great ability to love and learn, listen and change, helped keep me alive through all the years of pain and nightmare that were to come. She could not have known how difficult it would be to deal with madness; had no preparation for what to do with madness
none of us did
but consistent with her ability to love, and her native will, she handled it with empathy and intelligence. It never occurred to her to give up. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

I am tired of hiding, tired of misspent and knotted energies, tired of the hypocrisy, and tired of acting as though I have something to hide. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Depression is awful beyond words or sounds or images ... it bleeds relationships through suspicion, lack of confidence and self-respect, the inability to enjoy life, to walk or talk or think normally, the exhaustion, the night terrors, the day terrors. There is nothing good to be said for it except that it gives you the experience of how it must be to be old, to be old and sick, to be dying; to be slow of mind; to be lacking in grace, polish and coordination; to be ugly; to have no belief in the possibilities of life, the pleasures of sex, the exquisiteness of music or the ability to make yourself and others laugh. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

I think that when you're depressed, you can't concentrate long enough and well enough to read for the most part; some people can, but by and large people - that's one of the first things that goes, is the capacity to read meaningful literature. With grief, that's not true. For a while you can't read, but then you really are amenable to solace. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

There are scientists all around the world looking for the genes responsible for bipolar illness and major depression. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

But money spent while manic doesn't fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you're given excellent reason to be even more so. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

With grief, you have reason to despair; it's a human thing. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

The clinical hallmark of manic-depressive illness is its recurrent, episodic nature. Byron had this in an almost textbook manner, showing frequent and pronounced fluctuations in mood, energy, sleep patterns, sexual behavior, alcohol and other drug use, and weight (Byron also exhibited extremes in dieting, obsession with his weight, eccentric eating patterns, and excessive use of epsom salts). Although these changes in mood and behavior were dramatic and disruptive when they occurred, it is important to note that Byron was clinically normal most of the time; this, too, is highly characteristic of manic-depressive illness. An inordinate amount of confusion about whether someone does or does not have manic-depressive illness stems from the popular misconception that irrationality of mood and reason are stable rather than fluctuating features of the disease. Some assume that because an individual such as Byron was sane and in impressive control of his reason most of the time, that he could not have been "mad" or have suffered from a major mental illness. Lucidity and normal functioning are, however, perfectly consistent with-indeed, characteristic of-the phasic nature of manic-depressive illness. This is in contrast to schizophrenia, which is usually a chronic and relatively unrelenting illness characterized by, among other things, an inability to reason clearly. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Four thousand years ago, an Egyptian wrote out his despair onto papyrus in the form of a narrative and four short-versed poems. This document, now in the Berlin Museum, is thought by British psychiatrist Chris Thomas to be the first suicide note [...]

"Death is before me today
As a man longs to see his house
When he has spent years in captivity. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one's notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable, reactions to what life has dealt. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

But, with time, one has encountered many of the monsters, and one is increasingly less terrified of those still to be met. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

St. Andrews provided a gentle forgetfulness over the preceding painful years of my life. It remains a haunting and lovely time to me, a marrow experience. For one who during her undergraduate years was trying to escape an inexplicable weariness and despair, St. Andrews was an amulet against all manner of longing and loss, a year of gravely held but joyous remembrances. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it, an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Part of my stubbornness can be put down to human nature. It is hard for anyone with an illness, chronic or acute, to take medications absolutely as prescribed. Once symptoms of an illness go away, it becomes even more difficult. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful. In some strange way, I have tried to do that with manic-depressive illness. It has been a fascinating, albeit deadly, enemy and companion; I have found it to be seductively complicated, a distillation both of what is finest in our natures, and of what is most dangerous. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

How odd to smile during Richard's funeral. He was dead and I was smiling to myself. Grief does that. Laughter lies close in with despair, numbness near by acuity and memory with forgetfulness. I would have got used to it, but I didn't know this at the time. All I knew, was that memory had given pleasure first, then cracking pain. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Suicide is not a blot on anyone's name; it is a tragedy ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

It is tempting when looking at the life of anyone who has committed suicide to read into the decision to die a vastly complex web of reasons; and, of course, such complexity is warranted. No one illness or event causes suicide; and certainly no one knows all, or perhaps even most, of the motivations behind the killing of the self. But psychopathology is almost always there, and its deadliness is fierce. Love, success, and friendship are not always enough to counter the pain and destructiveness of severe mental illness ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Prolonged cocaine use, which diminishes dopamine functioning, gives support to the general rule that external sources of exuberance are ultimately overruled by the brain's inclination to seek out equilibrium. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

From a public health point of view, still the overwhelming problem is that people are not treated enough for depression; depression remains under treated. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Guilford concluded that creative individuals were also far more likely to exhibit "divergent" rather than "convergent" thinking:

In tests of convergent thinking there is almost always one conclusion or answer that is regarded as unique, and thinking is to be channeled or controlled in the direction of that answer....In divergent thinking, on the other hand, there is much searching about or going off in various directions. This is most obviously seen when there is no unique conclusion. Divergent thinking...is characterized...as being less goal-bound. There is freedom to go off in different directions....Rejecting the old solution and striking out in some direction is necessary, and the resourceful organism will more probably succeed. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

During the Renaissance there was a renewed interest in the relationship between genius, melancholia, and madness. A stronger distinction was made between sane melancholies of high achievement and individuals whose insanity prevented them from using their ability. The eighteenth century witnessed a sharp change in attitude; balance and rational thought, rather than "inspiration" and emotional extremes, were seen as the primary components of genius. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one's dark moods. Love can help, it can make the pain more tolerable, but, always, one is beholden to medication that may or may not always work and may or may not be bearable ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Now I had no choice but to live in the broken world that my mind had forced upon me. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

I have had manic-depressive illness, also known as bipolar disorder, since I was 18 years old. It is an illness that ensures that those who have it will experience a frightening, chaotic and emotional ride. It is not a gentle or easy disease. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

The intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness if my mind's flight made it very difficult for me to believe once i was better, that the illness was one i should willingly give up ... moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one's notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable reactions to what life has dealt ... even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost me my life. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Suicide is a particularly awful way to die: the mental suffering leading up to it is usually prolonged, intense and unpalliated. There is no morphine equivalent to ease the acute pain, and death, not uncommonly, is violent and grisly. The suffering of a suicidal is private and inexpressible, leaving family members, friends and colleagues to deal with an almost unfathomable kind of loss, as well as guilt. Suicide carries in its aftermath a level of confusion and devastation that is, for the most part, beyond description. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

No pill can help me deal with the problem of not wanting to take pills; likewise, no amount of psychotherapy alone can prevent my manias and depressions. I need both. It is an odd thing, owing life to pills, one's own quirks and tenacities, and this unique, strange, and ultimately profound relationship called psychotherapy ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

If people can talk about having breast cancer, why can't people who have mental illness talk about mental illness? Until we're able to do that, we're not going to be treated with the same kind of respect for our diseases as other people. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

God only knew what ran underneath the fierce self-discipline and emotional control that had come with my upbringing. But the cracks were there, I knew it, and they frightened me. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

When I first thought about writing this book, I conceived of it as a book about moods, and an illness of moods, in the context of an individual life. As I have written it, however, it has somehow turned out to be very much a book about love as well: love as sustainer, as renewer, and as protector. After each seeming death within my mind or heart, love has returned to recreate hope and restore life. It has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest. It has, inexplicably and savingly, provided not only cloak but lantern for the darker seasons and grimmer weather. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

As a child I had been quiet and invisible when troubled; as an adult, I had hidden my mental illness behind an elaborate construction of laughter and work and dissembling. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Chaos and intensity are no substitute for lasting love, nor are they necessarily an improvement on real life. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

When I am high I couldn't worry about money of I tried. So I don't. The money will come from from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

I believe that curiosity, wonder and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers; that restlessness and discontent are vital things; and that intense experience and suffering instruct us in ways that less intense emotions can never do. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Americans really believe that the past is past," he writes. "They do not care to know that the past soaks the present like the light of a distant star. Things that are over do not end. They come inside us, and seek sanctuary in subjectivity. And there they live on, in the consciousness of individuals and communities." The forward thrust of exuberance, like closure, risks leaving behind an essential past. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

The complexities of what we are given in life are vast and beyond comprehension. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Thank you for a lovely weekend.
They tell me it rained. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

I decided early in graduate school that I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came down to a choice between seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse. Since almost everyone I knew was seeing a psychiatrist, and since I had an absolute belief that I should be able to handle my own problems, I naturally bought a horse. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Several politicians and wives of politicians have been public about their experiences with depression or bipolar illness, including Lawton Chiles, Patrick Kennedy, Tipper Gore and Kitty Dukakis. Each made a tremendous difference by doing so. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Suicide Note:
The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss.
-Langston Hughes ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

I think wanting to write is a fundamental sign of disease and discomfort. I don't think people who are comfortable want to write ... ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Without science, there would be no such hope. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

People talk about grief as if it's kind of an unremittingly awful thing, and it is. It is painful, but it's a very, very interesting sort of thing to go through, and it really helps you out. At the end of the day, it gets you through because you have to reform your relationship, and you have to figure out a way of getting to the future. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Melancholic, although often sardonic, mixtures of emoitions-foreboding, aloneness, regret, and a dark sense of lost destiny and ill-used passions-are woven throughout Byron's most autobiographical poems, especially Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Lara, and Manfred. Perturbed and constant motion, coupled with a brooding awareness of life's impermanence, also mark the transient and often bleak nature of Byron's work. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Conditions of thought, memory, and desire, persuaded by impulse and irrationality, are influenced as well by personal aesthetics and private meanings. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Psychologists, for reasons of clinical necessity or vagaries of temperament, have chosen to dissect and catalog the morbid emotions - depression, anger, anxiety - and to leave largely unexamined the more vital, positive ones. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

An intense temperament has convinced me to teach not only from books but from what I have learned from experience. So I try to impress upon young doctors and graduate students that tumultuousness, if coupled to discipline and a cool mind, is not such a bad sort of thing. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

People are more impulsive and they get slightly less impulsive as they get older and the impulsiveness interacting with the depression is particularly devastating and lethal, potentially lethal. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living? ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Lithium prevents my seductive but disastrous highs, diminishes my depressions, clears out the wool and webbing from my disordered thinking, slows me down, gentles me out, keeps me from ruining my career and relationships, keeps me out of a hospital, alive, and makes psychotherapy possible. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Then, suddenly, I was unpredictably and uncontrollably irrational and destructive. This was not something that could be overcome by protocol or etiquette. God, conspicuously, was nowhere to be found. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Love has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Mania can be as terrifying as it gets. It is certainly as insane as one gets and so it's frightening when it gets out of control, but there are periods of mania when it can be extremely attractive. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Like my father, I looked up rather more than I looked out. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

I think people don't understand how intimately tied suicide is to mental illness, particularly to depressive illness and bipolar illness. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

It's more common than not that bipolar illness will start in the teens. One of the reasons I spend a lot of time on college campuses is exactly that reason. It's terribly important to talk to students about knowing these things in advance. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-- you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

In depression, your capacity to feel just flattens and disappears and what you feel is pain and a kind of pain that you can't describe to anybody. So it's an isolating pain, a completely isolating pain. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Everyone has good cause for suicide, or at least it seems that way to those who search for it. (74) ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Every seventeen minutes in America, someone commits suicide. Mostly, I have been impressed by how little value our society puts on saving the lives of those who are in such despair as to want to end them. It is a societal illusion that suicide is rare. It is not. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

In its severe forms, depression paralyzes all of the otherwise vital forces that make us human, leaving instead a bleak, despairing, desperate, and deadened state ... Life is bloodless, pulseless, and yet present enough to allow a suffocating horror and pain. All bearings are lost; all things are dark and drained of feeling. The slippage into futility is first gradual, then utter. Thought, which is as pervasively affected by depression as mood, is morbid, confused, and stuporous. It is also vacillating, ruminative, indecisive, and self-castigating. The body is bone-weary; there is no will; nothing is that is not an effort, and nothing at all seems worth it. Sleep is fragmented, elusive, or all-consuming. Like an unstable, gas, an irritable exhaustion seeps into every crevice of thought and action. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

I am by temperament an optimist, and I thought from the beginning that there was much to be written about suicide that was strangely heartening. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Violence, especially if you are a woman, is not something spoken about with ease. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Knowledge is marvelous, but wisdom is even better. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be separated from the present, and the present is painful beyond solace. 'This is my last experiment,' wrote a young chemist in his suicide note. 'If there is any eternal torment worse than mine I'll have to be shown. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

The awareness of the damage done by severe mental illness - to the individual himself and to others - and fears that it may return again play a decisive role in many suicides ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

An ardent temperament makes one very vulnerable to dreamkillers. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

I realized that it was not that I didn't want to go on without him. I did. It was just that I didn't know why I wanted to go on ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

A possible link between 'madness' and genius is one of the oldest and most persistent of cultural notions. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Most people don't have the advantage of being able to evaluate their doctor in advance. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

I love animals, and I was always attracted to the idea of being a zoo veterinarian or a veterinarian with the circus. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

lost a great innocence when I understood that I and my mind were not going to be on good terms for the rest of my life. I can't tell you how tired I am of character-building experiences. But I treasure this part of me; whoever loves me loves me with this in it. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

I am reminded of the importance of small kindnesses. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

We all move uneasily within our restraints. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

The great imaginative artists have always sailed "in the wind's eye," and brought back with them words or sounds or images to "counterbalance human woes." That they themselves were subject to more than their fair share of these woes deserves our appreciation, understanding, and very careful thought. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison